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Games of the week


By Features Reporter

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A Plague Tale: Innocence. Picture: Handout/PA
A Plague Tale: Innocence. Picture: Handout/PA

A Plague Tale: Innocence

Platform: PC, Xbox One, PS4

Genre: Adventure

Price: £44.99

An infectious thriller with real bite

As the Hundred Years' War erupts in 14th-century France, newly orphaned youngsters Amicia and Hugo surely couldn't imagine things would get worse. Yet each new horror in A Plague Tale: Innocence is only a taste of what will follow. To guide Amicia and her brother to safety, you'll have to sneak through plague houses, crawl over mass graves and negotiate pitch-black crypts seething with hordes of flesh-eating rats. Though it's largely a mix of simple stealth (make noise, creep past distracted guard) and environmental puzzles (make fire, scare away rats) the execution is so full of rich and characterful detail that you'll be captured immediately.

Skip to the end: Tense adventures in a superbly realised world.

Score: 9/10

Descenders. Picture: Handout/PA
Descenders. Picture: Handout/PA

Descenders

Platform: PC, Xbox One, PS4

Genre: Sports

Price: £19.99

Going downhill fast

Descenders has the lucky advantage of being the first mountain biking game in something like an aeon. Not that it isn't good – the sensation of speed, the huge freedom of the levels, the focus on accurate feel over contrived 'lifestyle' aspects (eg The Crew) credibly captures the spirit of the sport. But there's just not much to it. You race through runs of randomly generated tracks towards a main challenge for each region (forest, glacial, desert), collecting points that establish your global standing and unlocking gubbins like mohawks or T-shirts. Unlike the Trials series for example, there's no tangible career progression or player enhancement, just your own mastery of the controls, making Descenders an enjoyable but hollow experience.

Skip to the end: A welcome change but not a racing revolution.

Score: 7/10

Eternity: The Last Unicorn. Picture: Handout/PA
Eternity: The Last Unicorn. Picture: Handout/PA

Eternity: The Last Unicorn

Platform: PC, Xbox One, PS4, Switch

Genre: Action

Price: £16.99

Never-ending story

Eternity: The Last Unicorn attempts to resurrect a long-dead style of action gaming – the third-person fixed camera adventure. That style might have produced the brilliant Onimusha 3: Demon Siege back in 2004, but there's little brilliance of any kind to be found in this restrictive and unenjoyable rehashing of the formula. In a Norse-like world of elves and unicorns (or, at least, one unicorn) you awkwardly roam around poorly detailed environments, hunting out the interactive bits or slashing at an uninspired bestiary of hostile beasts in bouts of button-mashing combat. Meanwhile, though there's a glimmer of interest deep within the terribly dense lore, the story is told through unengaging static images and basic dialogue, suitably matching the dreary gameplay. Avoid.

Skip to the end: A senseless exercise in outdated design and janky combat.

Score: 2/10

Photographs. Picture: Handout/PA
Photographs. Picture: Handout/PA

Photographs

Platform: iPad/iPhone

Genre: Puzzle

Price: £3.99

What a picture

In Photographs, you work through a series of five vignettes that paint tragic tales using puzzles, sparse narrative and, yes, Polaroid-style snaps of crucial moments. It's a potentially poignant idea, even if it the varied settings require some amiable suspension of disbelief – a camera's perspective on a rising swim star makes perfect sense, but the concept hangs together less reasonably for a story of castle-dwelling wizards. But though the challenges sometimes hold indirect reflections of the theme (an old man helping a young girl escape, say), there's not enough of the fictional elements enmeshed within the puzzles to build the atmosphere. The puzzles are also repetitive and regularly monotonous. While Photographs has a definite ambition, it fails to develop successfully.

Skip to the end: A flawed attempt to blend puzzles with story.

Score: 6/10


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